Smells Like Heritage
One day in high school honors chemistry, I threw together a concoction that I thought was supposed to produce an artificial mint scent. I gave it a cautious waft and realized otherwise. I’d synthesized formaldehyde, and whenever I see “heritage” used as an adjective, I get a flashback—that same forebrain wallop from Ms. Koslowski’s class.
The reaction is immediately disorienting and more than a little involuntary. “Heritage rock,” “heritage pop,” “heritage act”—the word is meant to clarify, to situate something in time, to signal continuity and importance. But it lands with a faint chemical sharpness, as though something living has been reclassified into something preserved. That feeling is not entirely fair to the term. It names something real. But it also obscures as much as it reveals, and the tension between those two functions is worth examining.
Let's consider a recent lineup announcement for Chicago’s Windy Pop Weekender: The Softies, Rocketship, and Dressy Bessy in top billing. From a certain vantage point, “heritage twee” fits neatly. These are bands with established catalogs, anniversary reissues, recognizable sounds that have been absorbed into a broader indiepop vocabulary. One can draw a line from their work to younger artists, hear their influence refracted and normalized, and conclude that the form itself has settled into something legible and historical.
It's an accurate and an incomplete reading.
Because the same weekend, in the same rooms, you will find something that resists the classification. You will find people who were there the first time, people who arrived later through reissues or recommendations, and people encountering the music for the first time. You will find songs that are not being played as artifacts but as practices—performed, received, and felt in the present tense. What looks, from a distance, like a museum exhibit resolves, up close, into a temporary reconstitution of a scene.
The distinction that begins to emerge is not between past and present, but between two different kinds of resolution. There is historical resolution, in which a body of work becomes legible within a narrative: it can be described, categorized, and situated within a lineage. And there is lived resolution, in which that same work either continues to function as something active and meaningful or settles into the background as a known quantity. These two do not always coincide. In some cases, historical legibility can even enable lived experience—making something more discoverable than it might otherwise be—while still flattening or stabilizing its meaning.
Recent criticism of Rocketship’s A Certain Smile, A Certain Sadness—notably Pitchfork’s glowing reassessment—illustrates the point. The record is framed as having been absorbed into indiepop grammar, its innovations now part of the language rather than disruptions to it. For readers encountering the album as an object of retrospective analysis, this makes sense. The sound is familiar. Its elements can be named and traced. But from within a room where those songs are still being played, the sense that it has been fully absorbed into the canon—and thus completed—feels less convincing. The music may be historically legible, but it is not exhausted. It continues to be enacted, not just referenced.
This raises the question that sits underneath the “heritage” label: for whom is something resolved? A critic, writing at a distance, is engaged in the work of synthesis. The goal is to map, to identify patterns, to articulate influence. A participant, standing in a room with the music, is engaged in something else entirely. The work is not to describe the system but to inhabit it. These are not competing perspectives (there’s more than one critic blissfully lost in the moment at these shows), but they are not interchangeable either. A map is not the territory, even when it is accurate.
The term “heritage” tends to collapse these perspectives into a single frame. It describes how something appears within discourse—older, established, part of a past that can be revisited—but it risks implying that the thing itself has ceased to be active. In practice, what it often marks is distance. From far enough away, most things begin to look historical. Up close, the same things can remain contingent, unstable, and alive.
At the same time, it would be a mistake to swing too far in the other direction and dismiss the label entirely. Not everything persists. Some scenes do vanish. Recordings disappear, formats degrade, websites go dark. The infrastructure that once supported certain kinds of continuity—record stores, print publications, physical distribution—has shifted, sometimes dramatically. The concern that recent cultural work may be more fragile, less likely to leave durable traces, is not imagined. It is observable.
The presence of ongoing activity does not negate that fragility. A festival lineup or a well-attended show can give the impression of continuity, but it may also reflect a contraction in scale. What was once widely distributed may now circulate within smaller, more concentrated networks. From within those networks, the work feels alive. From outside them, it may be nearly invisible. Both conditions can exist simultaneously.
This is where the example of someone like Jed Bindeman becomes instructive. As the force behind a small reissue imprint, Concentric Circles, and a participant in the same live circuit, he is not maintaining a personal past but engaging with material that predates him. He is not a custodian in the traditional sense, preserving what he himself experienced, but a node in an ongoing process of selection, framing, and reactivation. His presence complicates the idea that “heritage” work is simply a matter of older generations tending to their own history. It suggests instead that continuity can be picked up, reinterpreted, and extended by those who arrive later.
That does not guarantee persistence. It does not solve the problem of what will remain accessible or legible in twenty years. But it does indicate that the underlying impulse—to find, to connect, to share—is not bound to a single cohort or infrastructure. It appears where conditions allow, and it adapts to the available tools.
Those conditions, however, matter. Earlier systems, for all their limitations and biases, created environments in which encounters could happen without prior intent. Physical proximity, constrained space, and the slow accumulation of objects in shared locations increased the likelihood of accidental discovery. A record in a bin did not require you to know it existed in order to find it. It only required that you be there.
Current systems, by contrast, tend to assume a degree of preselection. The material is available, often in greater quantity than before, but the pathways to it are more directed. This shifts the burden from presence to intent. The work has not disappeared, but the conditions under which it becomes encounterable have changed.
In that light, “heritage” begins to look less like a definitive category and more like a signal of this shift. It marks something that has become historically legible, but it does not tell us whether it remains lived, or how easily it can be encountered by those who were not already looking for it. It captures one dimension of the phenomenon while leaving others unaccounted for. Michael Hann’s effort to resist the calcification of older categories by redefining “classic rock” points in a similar direction, even if renaming alone doesn’t fully address the underlying dynamics.
My chemistry experiment anecdote, with its unintended synthesis, offers a way to think about this. The label is applied with a certain intention—to clarify, to situate—but the result carries an additional effect, one that is not entirely controlled. The smell lingers. It shapes the experience of the thing it names, sometimes in ways that feel disproportionate to its analytical usefulness.
None of this resolves the tension. It is entirely possible for something to be historically legible, structurally diminished, and still be lived. It is possible for it to be active in some places and effectively absent in others. It is possible for it to be both “heritage” and “present,” depending on where one stands.
If there is a question worth carrying forward, it may not be whether the term is right or wrong, but what it leaves out. What does it obscure about ongoing practice, about uneven persistence, about the role of proximity and encounter? And what does its increasing use tell us about how we are experiencing time, distance, and continuity in music?
There is no clean answer to the larger concern that sits behind all of this. Cultural memory has always been partial, always subject to erosion and reconstruction. Each generation builds its own structures of meaning and watches them shift. The difference now may be one of degree, of speed, of the fragility of the traces left behind. Or it may be that we are simply more aware of the process as it happens.
At Windy Pop Weekender, the label “heritage” may hover over the lineup, but in the rooms themselves, something else will be happening: people showing up, playing, listening, and reconnecting threads that have never been entirely severed. The names we use may matter less in the moment—but they shape who arrives at the room, and whether they arrive at all.
Postscript
Not long after writing this, I came across a comment from Bruce Licher on a thread by Ned Raggett. He mentioned that Terry Tolkin had once sent him a draft of his writings—reflections from his time in the music business—which he still has sitting on his computer. He offered to pass it along. Maybe it becomes a book. Maybe it doesn’t.
It was one of those moments where the abstract argument suddenly resolves into something very literal: not “heritage,” not quite preserved, not entirely lost—just sitting there, waiting on whether someone decides to pick it up and carry it forward.
If “heritage” sometimes feels like embalming, this is the opposite problem. Something that escaped preservation entirely, or only partially. And now the question isn’t how to categorize it, but how—or whether—to bring it back into circulation.
Which raises a slightly different, and slightly stranger, question. Not just how we preserve things, but how we reanimate them—and what changes in the process. As anyone familiar with those stories knows, reanimation is not restoration. Something is always altered. The question is whether that alteration is the cost of keeping something alive, or the point at which it becomes something else entirely.
I hadn’t planned to end up here. But it feels like the same problem, seen from the other side.